Murder By Death Bio:

They may call Bloomington, Indiana, home, but since their 2000 formation, Murder by Death have been a band without musical borders. Theirs is a world where Old West murder ballads mingle with rock-injected Western classicism; where an album’s sequencing can take listeners from a haunted back alley in rural Mexico to a raucous Irish pub. All of which is to say, Murder by Death albums don’t just string together songs; they create experiences. With their fifth album (and second for Vagrant), Good Morning, Magpie (04/06/10), Murder by Death continue the tradition of border expansion that drove career standouts like 2006’s In Bocca al Lupo and 2008’s Red of Tooth and Claw. The difference, however, is that this time, the band literally went off the map to get there.

“Going into the woods helped me write in a way I never would’ve been able to otherwise,” says singer/guitarist Adam Turla, recalling the 2009 retreat into the Tennessee mountains during which, armed with little more than a tent, a fishing pole and a notebook, he wrote the 11 songs that would become Good Morning, Magpie. “There were days where I’d sit down and write for seven hours, make dinner, and then sit down and write late into the night with my little camp light going: just intense, nonstop sessions of pure writing. I’ve never worked that way, ever, because with all the business of being a band, I’ve never had so little to do! Every day I was either cooking, hiking while writing, or writing. I didn’t speak to a single person the whole time.”

Be that as it may, Good Morning, Magpie still speaks volumes. Recorded at Bloomington’s Farm Fresh Studios with Jake Belser (who most recently worked with MBD on their all-instrumental soundtrack to Jeff Vandermeer’s 2009 book Finch), and mixed by Grammy-winning Red of Tooth and Claw producer Trina Shoemaker, the album weaves 11 disparate stories into a whole that’s unlike anything else in the band’s catalog. “These songs definitely come together as an album; we just aren’t relying on a concept this time,” says Turla, referencing the conceptual storylines that drove Murder by Death’s last two albums as well as 2002’s Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them? “Being out in the woods with no pressure freed me up to explore different moods and different stories, all of which became linked through the experience I had writing them: just that sheer sprint of working in isolation.”